The Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification.pdf

The Hidden Politics of Cultural IdentificationAuthor(s): Amelie Oksenberg RortySource: Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 152-166Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192136Accessed: 28/11/2008 21:33

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THE HIDDEN POLITICS OF CULTURAL IDENTIFICATION

AMELIE OKSENBERG RORTY Harvard Graduate School of Education and Mt. Holyoke College

IN Multiculturalism and the "Politics of Recognition," Charles Taylor attempts to justify culture-protective-and indeed culture-promotlng- legislation within a diverse liberal state.' He is surely right that even the most austerely value-neutral liberal states do in fact actively preserve at least some cultural values, and they promote the virtues specific to them, going far beyond the republican civic virtues necessary for any liberal state. Indeed, they cannot do otherwise: virtually all social practices implicitly express and reinforce a wide range of cultural directions and styles.2 After the conditions of consti- tutionality and precedent are satisfied, legislative and judicial decisions also weigh the preponderance of established custom against the benefits of changing it. It is not solely because such considerations affect enforcement that the expectations set by existing practices are measured against the predictable utility of their replacement. Taylor provides a justification for the inevitable, but in defending practices that liberals have not always acknowledged, he is also able to argue for their extension to minority as well as dormnant cultural groups. His essay is an eloquent defense of the politics of cultural survival.

But it is a curiously ironic feature of many recent arguments in the politics of entitlement-Taylor's among them-that they often appeal to the poetics of idealized cultural identity without fully acknowledging the ways that characterzing the "identity" of a culture is itself a politically and ideologically charged issue. Because individuals are, at least in part, essentially constituted and sustained by their cultural identities-so Taylor's argument goes-their basic protection extends to the protection of their cultures. A

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Byron Good, Jean Jackson, Daniel Little, Michel Oksenberg, MindaRae Amiran, and David Wong for helpful discussions and bibliographical counsel.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 22 No. 1, February 1994 152-166 ? 1994 Sage Publications, Inc. 152

Rorty / HIDDEN POLITICS 153

liberal state is not only charged with protecting individuals, it must also secure the basic conditions for their self-determination, as engaged in the activities that constitute their conceptions of the good. The citizens of a complex, diverse liberal democracy-so Taylor's argument continues-are entitled to the kind of cultural recognition that goes beyond the nghts of association, speech, and toleration. The claim to the right of cultural survival and of cultural self-determination-as it might extend beyond protection against unwarranted interference-appears to derive from the right accorded to the citizens in a liberal state actively to pursue their conceptions of a good life. If the state legitimately promotes the self-defining activities of individuals-centrally, for instance, assuring their basic education-it also is charged with promoting the self-defimng activities of its constitutive cultural groups. On this view, it is appropriate for indigenous cultural groups-Mexican-Americans, for instance, or the Navaho-to claim public support to promote their cultural survival.

Of course, there are other arguments for the public support of cultures whose existence is threatened. The grounds for those arguments are ex- tremely diverse. Taylor might, for instance, have defended his position on more familiar liberal grounds: protecting and promoting the varety of cultures is a way of assuring the diversity of opinion that robust critical public deliberation requires. Following this line would have enabled Taylor to extend the benefits of protective legislation to a variety of associations-on a continuum from the voluntary to the involuntary-without resting those protections on their roles in forming individual identity. And there are yet other arguments: some derive from considerations of compensatory remedies for past inJustices; others from the view that cultural vanety, like that of natural species, is intrinsically valuable and ought to be preserved.

But Taylor's position on multiculturalism is a direct expression of the exceptional continuity-we might fashionably call it a tightly closed narrative-of the central motifs that mark his intellectual history. That history begins with his analysis of the theme of the mutual recognition of the interdependence of power and subservience-in the "master-slave relation" passages-as the key to The Phenomenology of Splrit. Taylor's book on Hegel naturally led him to write a set of essays on the diverlsty of incommensurable goods and the moral conflicts they engender.3 Focusing on the problematics of choice brought Taylor to the second theme of his oeuvre: the tension between (and within) the multiple social constructions of individual identity on the one hand, and what we might call the romantic Kierkegaardian- Rilkean religion-friendly motif of radical individual choice. Against the background of his Hegelian historicism, Taylor's recognition of the deep tensions within his conception of the constitution of the individual naturally

154 POLITICAL THEORY / February 1994

led him to a history of the idea of the self. The conclusion of The Sources of the Self can be seen as a shifting double-image gestalt picture. Focusing on historncsm, Taylor concludes that because modern conceptions of the self inhent every layer of their archaeological history, our self-understanding is inevitably conflicted. Any choice would be equivalent to a frontal lobotomy. Focusing on the choices that such conflicts force on us, Taylor concludes that unless individuals receive the grace of a particular self-understanding, they must engage in a radical choice of a substantive identity. In the two mono- graphs that form the coda of The Sources of the Self, Taylor separates its tensed strands. The Ethics of Authenticity argues that engaged authentic individuals can and must nevertheless form a genuine interactive community.4 Multiculturalism and the "Politics of Recognition" argues that the protection of individual nghts requires protecting the cultures that hlstorically constitute at least part of their identity.

So much for Taylor's plot. Let us now turn to our counterplots.

CULTURE, SOCIETY, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS

We might well question Taylor's strong emphasis on the cultural construc- tion of identity. An individual's cultural identity is by no means the sole or even the dominant influence on his or her conception of a good life. Many other groups and associations also shape the habits-the frames of interpretation and categonzation, the pnmary practices, interests, and motivational preoccupations-that express, actualize, and define an individual's identity. Many of these are as comrmtted to perpetuating their values and practices as are cultures.5 Every political system can be regarded as a palimpsest com- posed of networks of distinctive and sometimes opposed groups and associations. An individual's identification by some of these classifications (na- tionality, for example) is demographically fixed; others (occupations and membership in religious communities, for example) involve a margin of individual choice. Some (like race) are stable; others (like age) are not. Because some socioeconomic classes are themselves identified by distinctive, and often contested crteria (income, social status, occupation, access to political power), an individual's class identity can be marked in several (and sometimes opposed) patterns, receiving respect by some of his class identifications, not by others.6 Some (like villages and extended families) attempt to promote a hlstorically marked sense of solidarity' others (like sex) neither presuppose nor attempt to form organized associations. The role that any of these groups or associations plays in an individual's identity-its role


in forming and sustaining her pursuit of (her conception of) a good life-var- ies contextually. Although it is certainly possible to resist their influence, identification in one group often affects an individual's place in others. Even when they do not form a cohesive association with a distinctive history, virtually all of these diverse classifications not only affect respect and self-respect but interests and alliances.

Identifying a cultural group, presumably in contrast to an economic or a social group, presents senous theoretical and practical problems for the "politics of recognition." The distinction between "culture" and economic or sociopolitical structures is a theory-bound distinction, one which once marked differences between academic disciplines-between anthropology, sociology, and economics-rather than differences in the practices or texts they analyze. Many cultural anthropologists deal with these problems in a single stroke: treating culture as a comprehensive way of life, they see all these classifications-"race," "gender," "class," "age," indeed the categorial distinctions between "nature," "polis," and "culture"-as cultural categories that define the significance of all activity and production.7

Influenced by their interpretation of Wittgenstein, anthropologists have also discredited the kind of cultural "essentialism" that characterized cultures by a set of relatively fixed ideas or styles, by "the meaning" of folklore (food, festivals, and fairy tales), cosmology, and social organization.8 Acknowledg- ing the difficulty of distinguishing cultures whose economic practices-and economic motivations-are interlocked, anthropologists analyze the dynamics of internal tensions, interpreting the significance and rationale of realign- ments in sociopolitical networks. The separation of culture from political and economic activity is seen as artificial and mlsleading. The significance of political and econormc practices is culturally defined, and cultural meaning is articulated and expressed in political and economic practices. On the one hand, culture cannot be understood in abstraction from the dynamics of political organization. On the other hand, economic exchange, judicial pro- cesses, medical procedures, or patterns of kinship and friendship cannot be understood independently of their cultural significance.

Multicultural though they may be, the citizens of most European and American states-certainly those of Canada and the Unted States-are significantly motivated by similar economic practices. Because their cultures strongly influence one another, because they share a political-economic culture, individuals of multicultural nations are in a sense themselves lntra- psychically multicultural.9 Typically, their shared identity-defining motives- and the vast range of interpretive habits they carry with them-permeate and often outweigh their cultural differences. It is not only economic protection- ism that moves opponents of the European Community they are also


convinced that cultural homogeneity follows directly upon a unified economy. They fear that their cultures-understood comprehensively as dynam- ically tensed and politicized articulations of way of life-will turn into the lifeless folklore of a museum diorama. The mutual permeability of the various dimensions of culture is surely also one of the reasons that at least some Quebecols would not be satisfied with cultural recognition within a unified federal system: separatists believe that economic, political, and legal self-determination is a precondition for the kind of genuine cultural survival that goes beyond remaining Francophomc. Specific legislation controlling Quebecois language(s) is, for them, a means for a far more comprehensive movement. Although separatists differ among themselves about the prmary advantages and rationale for separation, they agree that cultural survival cannot be assured by respectful recognition: it also requires far-reaching political and econormc self-determination.'?

Whereas Taylor sometimes broadly refers to culture as "a way of life" that includes political-economic practices and organzations, his argument requires a narrower usage. The question that frames his book-whether a liberal state can legitimately legislate the preservation of its indigenous cultures-presupposes a relatively sharp distinction culture and politics: it suggests that distinctive cultures can share a political-economic system. For the most part, Taylor's use of the term "culture" is closer to the German Bildung-a community's intellectual and spiritual achievements, as these might include its language as well as its literature and art. In his usage, "language"-like "culture"-has both a broad and a narrow sense. Narrowly, it refers to the set of natural languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese. In this sense, several cultures (those of Quebec, Geneva, Lyons, and Monte Carlo, for example) rmght have virtually the same language. But one of the reasons why Taylor joins many Quebecois in focusing on protective Francophonic legislation is that he thinks of languages more broadly the preservation of a language is central to the preservation of a way of life. It shapes the prmary interpretative categones and concepts that in turn focus patterns of salience that themselves in turn profoundly affect motivational structures." Since Taylor sometimes slips from one usage to another, his argument occasionally exploits the ambiguity of his usage.

CULTURAL DIFFERENTIATION

But even if we charitably allow Taylor the accordion movement, expanding and contracting his definitions of culture and of language, he owes us an


account of cultural differentiation. Because he focuses on cultures as the immediate and proper objects of "the politics of recognition," he needs cnteria for distinguishing them that are narrower than the demarcation of natural languages and more precise than the differentiation of "ways of life." If cultures differ from other identity-defining groups by virtue of their solidarity and historical continuity, we need critera for cohesive identity and continuity.

There are few philosophers who are more sensitive to the political dimen- sion of apparently neutral philosophic issues than Charles Taylor. It is therefore all the more surprsing that in taking Quebecols cultural survival as his prmary example he has made his case easier for himself than it should be. As Taylor presents them, the issues over Quebecols recogmtion have focused almost exclusively on the preservation of a specific language and on the policies and institutions required for-and legitimated by-that preservation. With such a simplified and abstracted charactenzation of the constituents of culture, it is not too difficult to argue that liberalism can, without jeopardizing its prmary commtments, extend certain rights of self-preservation to the dominant culture and to subcultures as long as the basic rights of individual citizens remain protected. But when cultures are more fully described, as including economic and political practices and attitudes, the politics of cultural definition and recognition becomes entangled in determining public policy on a vast range of substantive issues. For instance, how far might the preservation of Irish-American culture commit us to subsidizing the parochial schools of the Catholic population, recognizing that Catholic schools typically attempt to develop specific attitudes to many morally and politically charged divisive issues (publicly supported abortion, euthanasia, etc.)9 In funding parochial schools, does the state become an active party in determining not only their curricular standards, but also the direction of teaching? Is it duty bound to assure that the hinng practices of such schools follow general antidiscrimination practices? (Consider what this would do to the faculty of Catholic institutions.)

Given the history of cultural dispersion and influence, differentiating one culture from another is-in every sense of the term-contested territory.12 (Does Islam form a single culture that encompasses Bosnia, Turkey, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Indonesia?) Moreover, because the relatively arbitrary boundaries of moder nation-states by no means distinguish cultural or even linguistic groups, many cultural groups-like that of the Kurds, for example- are cross-national. For the Kurds, and for Turkey and Iraq, the issue of cultural recognition threatens the geopolitical boundaries of nation-states, whether or not they are committed to a liberal political structure.13


DEFINING CULTURAL IDENTITY

A liberal state attempting to preserve a culture must, of course, specify the identity of that culture. But cultural descriptions are politically and ideologically laden. Even an individual's claim to recognition as a person or as a human being carries a political agendum, implicitly contrasted with those marked by other designations: landowner, woman, Inuit, Bosnian, Muslim, or African American.14 The implicit cultural essentialism of a good deal of celebratory multiculturalism disguises the powerful Intracultural politics of determining the right of authoritative description.15 As a good deal of such characterzation is dynarmcally and dialectically responsive to politically charged external stereotyping, intracultural self-definition often changes with extracultural perceptions (and vice versa). Changes in the terminology for characterizing Negroes, colored people, blacks, Afro-Amercans, and African Americans in the past ten years amply demonstrate the politically charged dynamism of claims for the primacy of racial and cultural identity. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X each presented us all-the dominant and the subdormnant population alike-with radically different terms for our mutual recognition.

Many multiculturalists attempt to bypass the formidable conceptual problems of defining the identity of a culture by focusing on a shared inheritance. But how finely differentiated is that history to be understood? Shared histores often separate dramatically, the recent history of Afncan Americans who have been living in the ghettos of the urban North for three generations is significantly different from that of African Americans living in the agraran South. Do Inuit and Hasldic women have the same history as their fathers and husbands? Moreover, claims to a history of shared experience are typically most vigorously asserted when cultural unity is threatened. "We are all the descendants of slavery" becomes a central cultural theme when the African American elite is charged with being co-opted away from serving the interests of the disempowered.

The ever-present questions "From whose perspective9" and "In whose interests?" permeate the politics of thstorically based cultural characterization.'6 Dramatic shifts in recent Chinese hlstorography demonstrate the role of power politics in selecting and interpreting a presumptively shared inheritance. The Boxer Rebellion is seen as progressive or regressive; yesterday's heroes become today's villains and tomorrow's exemplars as the ideology of the ruling elite changes. Even highly theoretical debates about the shape of history-is it cyclical, as Chinese historians long claimed, or is it progres- sively linear, as Maolsts argued?-are manifestly politically charged issues. Any form of cultural essentialism invites intracultural Realpolitik.17


Even cultures that define a significant part of their shared inheritance by a canonc text (as well as by their claim to a history of shared experiences) are frequently politically divided by their differences over the interpretations of those texts. They even disagree about which parts of the text are to be treated as canonical.18 The continuity of Jewish history featured in the Passover seder becomes most marked when (the many varieties of) the diaspora threatens the central role of Judaism in structuring the lives of contemporary Jews. Both secular and religious groups are engaged in the politics of defining the demography and the shared inhertance of Jewish identity as it affects the structure of the Israeli legal and political systems. On the one hand, interpretations of the Torah and the Talmud are introduced in arguments over public policy Who-by virtue of being a Jew-is entitled to automatic citizenship under the law of return? On the other hand, contend- ing positions on public policy offer opposing interpretations of the canonic texts. Even economic factors affect the characterization of cultural identity' as many Israelis complain, the directions of Israeli-Jewish identity are affected by the exlgencles of self-presentation in their fund-raising activities abroad.

The politics of cultural essentialism is, if not coercive, as least often oppressive, even when individual rights are strictly preserved. Although they disagree among themselves about their primary directions, many Jewish American and African American communities press their members to define themselves as primarily Jews or blacks rather than as philosophers, women, or Red Sox fans. Such identifications involve a good deal more than display- ing Israeli or African crafts at home and at work. They carry the presumption of active participation in promoting specific policies: voting (this rather than that) black interests in departmental politics and pressing (this rather than that) specific Israeli interests to their congressmen. To be sure, individuals can decide to join their voices to the clamor over cultural definition, or they can attempt to ignore it and turn to cultivating their gardens. Both alternatives carry costly personal consequences in losses of alliances and frendship. Ironically, attempts to bypass cultural identification often retain the negative imprnt of their origins.19

THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL DEFINITION IN A LIBERAL STATE

Legitimating the politics of cultural survival has the advantage of openly acknowledging the inevitable. It has the further merit of introducing intracultural interest groups to work through their differences in the public


sphere.20 The good news is that as the power struggles involved in defining cultural identity become more visible we are in a better position to evaluate the ideological issues that lie behind them. The bad news is that those struggles tend to engage further divisions among existing interests. Long- standing cross-cultural hostilities are likely to become inflamed as various groups compete for public funds and public attention, all within the bounds of what passes for mutual respect.

Having gone beyond tolerance to celebration, many of those who favor the politics of multlcultural recognition are nevertheless still concerned to avoid condoning injustices, wherever they occur.21 They argue that cross- cultural criticism is appropriate: justice and integrity may require a culture to abandon some of its practices, however long-standing they may be. But because such criticism is typically presented in universalistic terms, it implicitly-and most effectively-appeals to values and principles that are presumed to be latent m the target culture.22 On the other hand, the most seanng criticisms are often internal, directed to what is seen as the core of the culture; dissenters become suspect, marked as marginal or alien. When criticism is voiced by the strongly empowered, it is interpreted as the continuity of the interpretation of fundamental principles.23 Closely examined, the distinction between lntracultural and cross-cultural criticism becomes blurred.

How is criticism to proceed without degenerating into the kinds of power struggles that are settled by charsma, influence peddling, or rhetorical brilliance9 Taylor rmght hope that in a liberal state the politics of cultural definition could, in principle, follow the procedural rules for deliberation about public policy, conforming to a model of conflict resolution recently proposed by Henry Richardson.24 Richardson suggests that moral conflicts can be resolved by using the method of reflective equilibrium to specify interpretations of indeterminate general moral norms (values, ends, and principles). Conflicts about characterizing a culture might be resolved by deliberating how best to specify and sometimes modify shared highly general norms. Richardson proposes to carry Rawls's "wide reflective equilibrium" to the level of concrete cases, avoiding arbitrary decisions by a coherence standard for rationality.25

Although Richardson's strategies for resolving moral conflicts could, in principle, sometimes successfully arbitrate contested characterizations of cultural identity, their utility is severely limited. Cultures are not identified by a set of beliefs or principles: they cannot be characterized by an overlap- ping credal consensus.26 (Imagine trying to characterize the culture of the Pieds Nolrs of Paris by articulating their consensus on general norms, not to mention the culture of Israel by articulating Israeli consensus on anything.) Profound disagreements about cultural identity reappear in the attempt to


formulate presumptively shared norms, even when they are acknowledged to remain partially indetermnate. Even communities whose members agree on central procedural pnnclples can only use those pnnclples as constraints: they are unlikely to provide a basis for specifying other substantive ends or values. Moreover, cultural cohesion and continuity are sometimes best served by allowing ends and norms to remain vague and ambiguous so that contend- ing groups can interpret them in their own ways without pressing for a consensus on their specification.

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson have recently proposed an analysis of conditions that would justify introducing serious moral disagreements in discussions of public policy. They argue that a liberal state "must permit greater moral disagreement about policy and greater moral agreement on how to disagree about policy. Pnnclples of accommodation and mutual respect govern the conduct of moral disagreement on issues that should reach the public agenda."27 Taylor might hope that the Gutmann-Thompson conditions could be used to govern disagreements about contested cultural definition. Aside from the problem of reducing or translating cultural identity into a set of beliefs and principles, there is sure to be disagreement about whether cultural definrtion should be brought into the public sphere at all: isn't it the proper domain of intracultural debate, even when prudence suggests sensitivity to external perceptions? Further, when the members of a culture disagree about how to specify its moral norms, they are also likely to disagree about second-order princlples of accommodation and about what constitutes mutual respect. For instance, immigrant groups frequently suffer from sharp intergenerational disagreements about the conditions for proper mutual respect. What-and who-defines the limits of the authority of the elders of the community? When they disagree, as often they do, about the norms that should define their cultural identity, they typically also disagree about the second-order pnnclples of accommodation and respect that should govern their discussion.

THE POLITICS OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

One of great merits of Taylor's discussion is his focus on educational institutions and practices as the primary terrain of multicultural recognition. Here as before, Taylor's position on the politics of multicultural education bear the marks of its Hegelian orgins.28 The politics of mutual recognition- the role of "the look of the other" in forming the kind of self-respecting self-consciousness that he thinks is a precondition for civic agency-is the


liberal grandchild of Hegel's analysis of the master-slave relation. But however liberating self-consciousness and self-respect may be, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine, enlightened civic participation. Although they sometimes provide an important enabling contribution, self- regarding attitudes are only as good as the competence-the knowledge and skills essential to empowerment-on which they depend.

Considering how ignorant we are of Asian and African history, of the literature and the geopolitics of Latin Amernca-how unable we are to commumcate in Spanish, Chinese, or German-no one could reasonably object to a policy mandating language requirements and cultural studies in the curricula of public schools. But the best argument for extending our linguistic repertoire and expanding the curriculum is not that those studies will conduce to cultural or individual self-respect. A liberal state should promote serious cross-cultural studies in the public schools because igno- rance is politically dangerous and being monolingual is only one step away from being mute. Cultural history sometimes enhances respect and self- respect, and sometimes it does not; self-respect sometimes enhances morally sensitive political activity, and sometimes it does not. The history of Western Europe is, as we are often rightly reminded, unlikely to promote the respect or self-respect of Americans of European descent: it would be surprising if African, Asian, and Latin American history were radically different.

None of the complexities of Taylor's analysis of cultural recognition-and none of the reservations we might have about it-argue against the general direction of his position as it affects educational policy. The question is, how should we expand the curriculum? Although the kind of appreciative sam- pling of multicultural folklore, sacred texts, and major literary works now favored in most kindergartens and many universities hardly qualifies as genuine cultural study, it provides a beginning that could be used to promote genuine geopolitical and cultural exploration. Because folklore and sacred texts typically encode references to highly divisive sociopolitical controversies, a serious attempt to understand them leads directly to anthropology and to political history.

I would like to close by touching on that drearily fashionable topic, the extension of the canon: the modern version of Swift's battle of the books. Both the critics and the defenders of the existing core canon of educational classics are guilty of an odd form of idolatry' they treat books as if they were powerful icons, to be either revered or defaced.29 Defenders argue that those works represent our best and most estimable achievements: the hope of civility rests in our preserving and appropriating them. Critics want either to widen the representation of saints or to show that the icons of the Western classics are worm-eaten.


The battle of books extends to the ways we recogmze "otherness." Interpretive reading-of events, architecture, and persons as well as books-does not consist of ever more finely discriminating appreciation; it does not involve treating books and events as engraved texts and intertexts.30 When we are lost in the admiration-or the exposure-of a perfectly polished text, reading does not enlarge and empower us. Adding LuXun, Borges, and Achebe to the pantheon of heroic literary achievement does not by itself promote either the sense or the skills of civic participation that public education should develop. Chinese American and Chicano American chil- dren will not become self-respecting active citizens by beconmng passive consumers of their cultural achievements. They must, rather, become actively engaged in the work-the uncertainties and struggles-of interpreting writing as a form of action. Even scientific works like Galileo's Two New Sciences or philosophical works like Descartes's Meditations-let alone The Feder- alist Papers, LuXun's stories, or Borges's fantastic constructions-are best understood as attempts to integrate novel (as yet barely understood) intuitions with inherited (barely recognized) assumptions. Learning to read well is a sound preparation for participation in the melee of political and cultural activity, not primarily because it informs or inspires but because the searching activities of interpretive reading are, at their best, also exercised in political life. Reading does not separate a stage of appreciative empathic immersion followed by a stage of externalized objective judgment: it merges tact, resourceful improvisation, and criticism in the detective work of deciphering unstated questions and preoccupations. It locates uncertainties and unre- solved tensions, tracing strategies of inventive reconciliation among the varied directions of authorial (agent) purposes; it understands where-and why-negotiated resolutions fail; it projects the inheritance of problems that authors pose for their successors. As his own political activity and historical studies attest, Taylor, unlike many other proponents of celebratory multiculturalism, clearly knows that respectful recognition involves reconstruc- tive and politically charged critical interpretation.31 But unlike many politically active liberal pluralists, Taylor's defense of multiculturalism remains rooted in the premises of Hegelian idealism.

NOTES

1. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the "Politics of Recognition" (Pnnceton, NJ: Prnceton University Press, 1992) is a closely related sequel to his The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1992).


2. Cf. William Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambrdge: Cambridge Umversity Press, 1991).

3. Hegel (Cambridge Umnversity Press, 1975); Philosophical Papers, vols. 1 and 2 (Cam- bridge Umversity Press, 1985 and 1986).

4. Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 5. See S. Wolf, "Comments," in Taylor, Multiculturalism, esp. 76-78; A. Rorty, "Varieties

of Pluralism in a Polyphonic Society," Review of Metaphysics, 1990; and A. Rorty and D. Wong, "Aspects of Identity and Agency," in 0. Flanagan and A. Rorty, eds., Identity, Character and Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

6. See Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industral Society (Stanford, CA. Stanford Umversity Press, 1959); The Logic of Social Hierarchies, edited by Edward Lauman, Paul Siegel, and Robert Hodge (Chlcago: Markham, 1970); and Hans Gerth and C. Wrght Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1953).

7. See, e.g., Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973) and Local Knowledge (New York, 1983) for analyses of culture as pervading all forms of political and sociocultural orgamzation.

8. For a fascinating transition from an essentialist analysis to a dynarmc account of symbolic oppositions, see James Peacock, Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1987). But the argument can also go in the other direction: Clifford Geertz's early work, Agricultural Involution (University of Chicago Press, 1963) and Peddlers and Princes (University of Chicago Press, 1963), begins with the dynamic interaction between social distinctions and economic change, whereas his later work is largely focused on the significance of cultural style and categories.

9. See Amy Gutmann, in Taylor, Multiculturalism, 3-24, and her "The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Fall 1993.

10. See Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). Many separatists, believing that the dominant Anglo- phomc community has structured the economy to its own advantage, base their arguments largely on economic grounds.

11. See Taylor, "Language and Human Nature" and "Theories of Meaning" in Human Agency and Language, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Umversity Press, 1985). But even linguistic preservation can readily become a contested ideological issue: would Canadian schools teach standard Parisian French or the markedly different working-class Quebecois?

12. See Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969); James Clifford, "Sites of Crossing: Borders and Diasporas in Late 20th-Century Expressive Culture," Cultural Currents, January 1993; and William Roseberry, "Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anthropology," Social Research 59 (1992).

13. See Eric Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Eric Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

14. See "Persons and Personae," in Amelie Rorty, Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon, 1988), esp. 30-41.

15. See the essays by Robert LeVine, Roy D'Andrade, Clifford Geertz, and Howard Gardner in Culture Theory, edited by Richard Schweder and Robert LeVine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); the essays by James Clifford and George Marcus in James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Jean Jackson, "Is There a Way to Talk about Making Culture without Making Enemies?" Dialectical Anthropology 14 (1989): 12744; and Jean Jackson, "Culture,


Genuine and Spurious: The Politics of Indianness in the Vaup6s, Colombia" (American Ethnology, forthcoming).

16. Inuit women are, for example, far less enthusiastic about recovering/preservig their traditional customs than are the men of the tribe. See also Michael M.J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Moder Arts of Memory," in James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture, 194-233; Richard Handler, "On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in Narrating Nationalism an Ethnicity," Journal of Anthropological Research 41 (1985): 171-82; Erc Hobsbawn, "Inventing Traditions," in E. Hobsbawm and T. Rangner, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Unverslty Press, 1983), 1-14; and Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

17. I am grateful to Michel Oksenberg for many illurmnating discussions and for guiding my reading on these topics. See Paul Cohen, "The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth," Journal ofAsian Studies, 1992:82-113; Albert Feuerwerker, History in Communist China (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); and Andrew March, The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographical Thought (New York: Praeger, 1974).

18. For a fascinating discussion of textually defined cultural identity, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishal Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1992), and Moshe Halbertal's essay on defining the canon (manuscript).

19. See Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modem Arts of Memory." 20. The psychoanalytic expression "working through"-which involves the continuous

process of resolving of identity-defining conflicts-provides a helpful model for the politics of cultural identity. Among other things, "working through" acknowledges internal tensions that are often denied by essentializing self-characterizations.

21. See Lawrence Blum, "Liberalism and Multiculturalism," The Boston Review, September/ October, 1992: 30-31, and his "Multiculturalism, Racial Justice and Community," in L. Foster and P. Herzog, eds., Pluralism and Multiculturalism: Conflicts and Controversies (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming); and Susan Wolf, "Comment," in Taylor, Multiculturalism, 75-86. Remnants of essentialism linger in these arguments. While recognizing that our own perspectives may be parochial or ideologically slanted-the argument runs-"we" should evaluate at least some of the practices of the cultures that we affirm and validate as though "we" and "their culture" were fixed points.

22. See Michael Walzer, "Minimal Moralism," in William Shea and Antonio Spadafora, eds., From the Twilight of Probability (Canton, MA. Science History Publications, 1992), Interpre- tation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1987), and The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

23. Cf. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1987).

24. See Henry Richardson, "Specifying Norms as a Way to Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1990, esp. 290 if. Using a somewhat different terminology, Taylor seems to move in that direction in his "Explanation and Practical Reason" (manuscript).

25. Richardson, "Specifying Norms," 302. 26. For an excellent critique of the use of the concept of "belief' in anthropological analysis,

see Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 1.

27. Amy Gutmann and Denms Thompson, "Moral Conflict and Political Consensus," Ethics, 1991: 64-65.


28. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1992). For a trenchant assessment of Taylor's recent work, see Arthur Danto's review in The Times Literary Supplement, January 1993.

29. Swift's "The Battle of the Books between the Ancients and the Moders" provides a nice analogue of current controversies about the multicultural expansion of the canon. See also David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and thoughtful, provocative reviews of that book by Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books, February 1993, and Jeremy Waldron, Times Literary Supplement, January 1993.

30. See John Searle, The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990. 31. See Taylor, The Sources of the Self(Cambrdge, MA. Harvard University Press, 1989).

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty teaches philosophy at the Harvard Graduate School of Educa- tion and at Mt. Holyoke College. She is authorof Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon, 1988) and numerous articles on the history of ethics and moral psychology.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, a book series published by Ropodi Press, Amsterdam and partly sponsored by Adam Micklewlcz University, Poznan, Poland, invited articles for consideration in its forthcormng volume on "The Nature of Political Dialogue." Articles can address a wide range of topics under this general heading. Analyses of concepts such as compromise, consensus, and cooper- ation. Interpretations of notions like dialogical theory or the dialogical self. Applications such as gender, religious, and racial conflict. Examinations of concrete historcal problems and the obstacles and/or possibilities for political dialogue in these cases. Comparisons of the meaning of and prospects for political dialogue in established and new democracies. Manuscripts should be submitted in duplicate, typed, and double spaced on one side of the page. The author's name and affiliation should appear on a separate sheet at the end of the manuscript after the endnotes. Send manuscripts to Stephen L. Esquith, Department of Philosophy, 503 South Kedzie Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824.

Deadline for submission is December 1, 1994.

Article Contentsp.152p.153p.154p.155p.156p.157p.158p.159p.160p.161p.162p.163p.164p.165p.166

Issue Table of ContentsPolitical Theory, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 1-194Volume InformationFront Matter [pp.1-2]Editorial [pp.3-4]Gender Inequality and Cultural Differences [pp.5-24]Spirited Commonality and DifferenceThe Judgmental Gaze of European Women: Gender, Sexuality, and the Critique of Republican Rule [pp.25-44]"Internal Restlessness": Individuality and Community in Montesquieu [pp.45-70]

Between Modernity and Postmodernity: Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment against the Grain [pp.71-97]Labor Regulation and Constitutional Theory in the United States and England [pp.98-123]Three Ways to Be a Democrat [pp.124-151]The Cultures of MulticulturalismThe Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification [pp.152-166]Strangers and Liberals [pp.167-175]

Books in Reviewuntitled [pp.176-179]untitled [pp.179-181]untitled [pp.181-186]untitled [pp.186-190]untitled [pp.190-194]

Documents

The Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification.pdf